Libanius’s oration _On the Carpet_, in which he lectures them on the subject. We do not hear of any scholarships, bursaries, or exhibitions intended to help indigent lads of ability. Indeed, this giving a lad money rewards for educating himself seems a very evil device of modern times. To support a student with the bare necessaries of life, and give him free instruction, is a different thing, and this was the idea of the pious founders of scholarships. To repay him in part for an extravagant preparation by extravagant prizes is a very different notion, but now so diffused that its absurdity no longer strikes the public mind in England. § 80. Gregory the Nazianzen tells us of comic ceremonies by which the freshman was initiated to his studies, and these practices were technically called τελεταί, or initiatory rites. These are to be compared to the teasing of beginners known at the German universities under the name of _deposition_. At Athens the novice was brought by a band to the baths through the market-place. Then those in front began to push him back, and refuse to let him in, while those behind thrust him forward. After a rude struggle, probably intended to try his temper, he was let in, bathed, and thus formally admitted, receiving his _tribon_, or college gown. There was also some unknown ceremony in the theatre, called κυλίστραι, of which the name only is preserved, from its being forbidden by law in 693 A.D., and this by a Church synod in Constantinople. It was identified with other heathen practices and traditions, and hence considered worthy of being threatened with excommunication. These late occurrences of student practices give rise to the suspicion that they may have been copied in the early school of Bologna. Perhaps the most curious allusion[69] is to the fact that, after a certain standing, students were by common consent excused from these follies, as now in Germany a graduate at Leipzig or Göttingen, or a professor, would no more think of fighting a student’s duel than an English gentleman would; while every younger man is compelled to do so by an iron custom amounting to the most absolute tyranny.